Tag: Carter Page

Congressional investigators subpoenaed Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser, NBC News reported. Page is expected to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to provide testimony about his role in the Trump campaign and his connections to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence demanded that Michael Flynn Jr., the son of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, provide documents and testimony about his fathers business dealings,according to Reuters. Flynn Jr. is likely to receive a subpoena, ABC News reported.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller interviewed Matt Tait, the cybersecurity expert who GOP operative Peter Smith asked to review hacked Hillary Clinton emails last year, Business Insider reported. Both Mueller and Tait declined to comment. Muellers team also interviewed Sean Spicer, the former White House communications director and press secretary, about President Trumps conduct while in office, according to Politico. The investigators asked Spicer about the circumstances of Trumps firing of James Comey and Trumps Oval Office meeting with Russias foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.

Federal judges issued two separate orders halting the Trump administrations latest travel ban order,the Washington Post reported. On Tuesday, a federal district judge in Hawaii temporarily blocked nationwide the implementation of the September 24 travel ban proclamation. Wednesday morning, a federal judge in Maryland issued a second, narrower suspension, stopping enforcement of the ban only for those with a bona fide relationship with the U.S.

Congressional investigators subpoenaed Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser, NBC News reported. Page is expected to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to provide testimony about his role in the Trump campaign and his connections to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence demanded that Michael Flynn Jr., the son of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, provide documents and testimony about his fathers business dealings,according to Reuters. Flynn Jr. is likely to receive a subpoena, ABC News reported.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller interviewed Matt Tait, the cybersecurity expert who GOP operative Peter Smith asked to review hacked Hillary Clinton emails last year, Business Insider reported. Both Mueller and Tait declined to comment. Muellers team also interviewed Sean Spicer, the former White House communications director and press secretary, about President Trumps conduct while in office, according to Politico. The investigators asked Spicer about the circumstances of Trumps firing of James Comey and Trumps Oval Office meeting with Russias foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.

The European Commission will keep the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, the agreement that allows the transatlantic transfer of cross-border data under European law, in place after a positive annual review, Reuters reported. The omission was satisfied that the protections put in place adequately safeguarded Europeans personal data. It asked Washington to implement more privacy protections in this years reauthorization of electronic surveillance authorities under the Section 702 program.

Irans supreme leader threatened to shred the nuclear deal if the U.S. withdraws from the agreement,according to Reuters. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran would respect the accord as long as all other signatories met their obligations under the deal. He continued, Trumps stupidity should not distract us from Americas deceitfulness. He also demanded that European states refrain from sanctioning and interfering with Irans missile program.

A top election official in Kenya resigned and fled the country, saying it would be impossible for the upcoming presidential election to be credible, the Post reported. Another leading election commissioner said he also thought a fair election was impossible. After Kenyas Supreme Court invalidated the presidential election result in August, election authorities scheduled a new vote for next week. But Raila Odinga, the leading opposition candidate, dropped out of the race, and his supporters have taken to street demonstrations instead.

Senator John McCain blocked Defense Department nominees over a dispute about clarifying the Trump administrations Afghanistan strategy,according to the Post. McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would not schedule confirmation votes for any Defense nominees for top political posts until the administration gives him details about its conditions for aid to Afghanistan. McCain has repeatedly demanded that Secretary of Defense James Mattis say exactly how the latest troop increase will change circumstances in Afghanistan.

The Senate intelligence committee will put forth clean reauthorization of the intelligence communitys Section 702 spying programs under Title XII of the FISA Amendments Act, Politico reported. Chairman Richard Burr said the intelligence committees reauthorization proposal would not significantly change the requirements under Section 702. It would not limit the FBIs authority to search the Section 702 database nor impose new restrictions on unmasking the identities of Americans caught in the surveillance, as the House Judiciary Committees proposal does.

The head of U.N. peacekeeping operations warned that South Sudan is sliding into chaos and escalating violence, the New York Times reported. After a peace initiative from neighboring African countries stalled, the U.N.s peacekeeping chief warned the Security Council that the countrys armed factions needed to rescue South Sudan from the impending abyss. U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley will visit South Sudan next week.

A group of veterans sued pharmaceutical companies over allegations the firms paid bribes to militias in Iraq that killed American soldiers, NBC News reported. The veterans are seeking damages from a group of American and European companies that they say bribed officials linked to the Mahdi Army, an Iranian-backed militia.

The Guardians Shaun Walker presented the findings a report from a Russian newspaper about the Internet Research Agency, the so-called troll farm that attempted to influence the 2016 election on 2016.

The New York Times Magazines Jason Zengerle wrote about Secretary Rex Tillerson and the decline of the State Department.

BuzzFeed News Dan Vergano wrote an in-depth account of the U.S. special forces raid on Kunduz, a city in the north of Afghanistan, last year that left 26 civilians and two American soldiers dead.

ICYMI: Yesterday, on Lawfare

Peter Margulies argued that the Hawaii federal district court rightly blocked the implementation of the most recent travel ban on the basis that it violates the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Michael Paradis explained the implications of the collapse of Al-Nashiris defense team for the military commissions cases.

Daniel Byman posted the second part of his series on whether domestic right-wing violence should be labeled as terrorism.

Vanessa Sauter posted the transcript of the FBI directors remarks about Section 702 at the Heritage Foundation last week.

Stewart Baker shared the Cyberlaw Podcast, featuring a discussion with Shane Harris on his reporting on recent developments linking Kaspersky to Russian espionage. Baker posted a second episode featuring an interview with Marten Mickos, CEO of a bug bounty company.

Sauter shared a bonus edition of the Lawfare Podcast, featuring a debate between Benjamin Wittes and Steve Vladeck about the unnamed American enemy combatant detainee.

Emailthe Roundup Team noteworthy law and security-related articles to include, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for additional commentary on these issues. Sign up to receive Lawfare in your inbox. Visit our Events Calendar to learn about upcoming national security events, and check out relevant job openings on our Job Board.

President Donald Trump’s former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer sat down with special counsel Robert Mueller for an extensive interview on Monday. During the interview, Spicer and Mueller discussed the firing of FBI Director James Comey, as well as Trump’s meetings with Russian officials and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the Oval Office, according to a Politicoreport citing sources familiar with the meeting.

Spicer’s meeting signals that Mueller is increasing the number of interviews with former and current members of the Trump administration. A report by The Washington Postin September found that he was expecting to interview six White House advisers, including communications director Hope Hicks and former chief of staff Reince Priebus.

In fact, Priebus was interviewed last Friday, as the Mueller team considers him important because he was part of Trump’s conversations on firing Comey and meetings with Russian officials. Other White House aides reportedly on the list of possible interviews include White House counsel Don McGahn, communications adviser Josh Raffel and associate counsel James Burnham. The overall investigation intends to shed light on whether Russia meddled in the 2016 elections and colluded with Trump.

Even though Trump hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing, for now, his allies fear the president could face impeachment if Republicans lose the House next year. While it is too soon to predict Trump’s ouster, here are some key elements of the Mueller investigation so far:

May 17: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller to spearhead the Russia probe.

July 15-16: Mueller reportedly asked for the name of the person who represented two Russians with connections to Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013 during a 2016 meeting attended by Donald Trump Jr.

July 25: Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, had his house raided by the FBI under Mueller’s inquiry, The New York Times reported. Authorities found binders and other documents that could lead to possible secret offshore bank accounts opened by Manafort.

August 1: Mueller appointed former U.S. Justice Department official Greg Andres, who then became the 16th lawyer on the team.

August 3: Mueller named a “grand jury,” signaling that a larger investigation was underway.

August 31: Mueller reportedly teamed up with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to investigate Manafort.

September 15: Mueller obtained a search warrant for Facebook accounts linked to Russian operatives that aimed to influence the 2016 presidential election. Experts called the warrant a “turning point” in the investigation.

September 28: Ivanka Trump and Kushner’s private email domains face investigation, as well as batches of emails from White House senior aides. The investigation, conducted by the White House, hopes to find anything relevant to Mueller’s Russia probe.

A person who worked for the Russian “troll farm” Internet Research Agency discussed the organization with the independent Russian news outlet Dozhd.

The secretive factory had several components, including a “Russian desk,” a “foreign desk,” a “Facebook desk,” and a “Department of Provocations,” according to the former troll, who went by the name “Maxim.”

The Russian desk operated bots and trolls that used fake social-media accounts to flood the internet with pro-Trump messages and made-up news.

The foreign desk was more sophisticated, with trolls required to learn the nuances of American politics to best “rock the boat” on divisive issues.

“Our task was to set Americans against their own government,” Maxim said, “to provoke unrest and discontent.”

Recently revealed details about how an infamous Russian “troll farm” operated and its role in Russia’s disinformation campaign shed new light on Russia’s interference in the 2016 US presidential race.

One former troll, who was interviewed by the independent Russian news outlet Dozhd and went by “Maxim,” or Max, spoke of his experience working for the Internet Research Agency, a well-researched Russian company in St. Petersburg whose function is to spread pro-Russian propaganda and sow political discord in nations perceived as hostile to Russia.

The secretive firm is bankrolled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, CNN reported, a Russian oligarch who is a close ally of President Vladimir Putin.

The Internet Research Agency, Max told Dozhd, consisted of a “Russian desk” and a “foreign desk.” The Russian desk, which was primarily made up of bots and trolls, used fake social-media accounts to flood the internet with pro-Trump agitprop and made-up news throughout the US presidential campaign, especially in the days leading up to the November election.

The foreign desk had a more sophisticated purpose, according to Max, who worked in that department. “It’s not just writing ‘Obama is a monkey’ and ‘Putin is great.’ They’ll even fine you for that kind of [primitive] stuff,” he told Dozhd. In fact, those who worked for the foreign desk were restricted from spreading pro-Russia propaganda. Rather, Max said, their job was more qualitative and was geared toward understanding the “nuances” of American politics to “rock the boat” on divisive issues like gun control and LGBT rights.

“Our goal wasn’t to turn the Americans toward Russia,” he added. “Our task was to set Americans against their own government: to provoke unrest and discontent, and to lower Obama’s support ratings.”

An entire department, the “Department of Provocations,” was dedicated to that goal: Its primary objective was to disseminate fake news and sow discord in the West, according to CNN.

The troll farm also had its own “Facebook desk,” whose function was to relentlessly push back against the platform’s administrators who deleted fake accounts as they began gaining traction. When Internet Research Agency employees argued against having their accounts deleted, Max said, Facebook staffers would write back, “You are trolls.” The trolls would in turn invoke the First Amendment right to free speech — occasionally, they won the arguments.

Facebook is now at the center of congressional and FBI investigations that are examining the extent to which Russia used social-media platforms to influence American political opinion.

Facebook has turned over more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads to Congress. RBC’s investigation found that in 2016 Russia’s propaganda network on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter could have reached 30 million people a week, and a Columbia University social-media analyst published research that found that Russian propaganda may have been shared billions of times on Facebook alone.

In addition to spreading fake news, Russian Facebook accounts went one step further by organizing events, rallies, and protests, some of which galvanized dozens of people. To be sure, RBC found that the Internet Research Agency hired 100 American activists over the internet to hold 40 rallies across different US cities. Those people did not know they were working for a Russian organization, according to the investigation.

The vice chair of the Senate committee investigating Russian meddling in the US election said he was concerned about new revelations that a St. Petersburg troll farm had sent operatives to the US and linked up with activists here.

Sen. Mark Warner of the Senate Intelligence Committee was previously unaware of the report by Russian news outlet TV Rain, which said the Internet Research Agency, a so-called troll farm based in St. Petersburg, had a “secret department” that deployed operatives to the US.

“I’d really like to look at it,” Warner said of the report, adding that he’d been concerned “for some time” that the St. Petersburg troll farm was not the only one buying ads and running social media campaigns to try to influence the outcome of elections in foreign countries.

“I believe there are more in Russia and in countries that there may have been Russian-influenced activities in, some of the Eastern European countries,” Warner told reporters on Capitol Hill. “I’m not saying they were all directed necessarily to the United States, but this is why we need this kind of thorough review from the platform companies to really dig in this the same way that we dig in on … a profit-making venture.”

The Internet Research Agency has for years operated as a troll farm, where employees create multiple online characters both to shape public opinion online and to exacerbate political tensions around the world. At the prodding of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian attempts to influence the US election, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have admitted that the agency purchased political ads.

Many of the ads purchased by the St. Petersburg troll farm weren’t explicitly political, but encouraged American users to “like” a page — which meant they would be more likely to see divisive, Russian-made political content in their Facebook feed, according to a source familiar with the ads.

The TV Rain report, citing a former employee using the pseudonym Maxim, is the first time allegations have emerged that the troll farm dispatched operatives to the US. What those employees were assigned to do was not detailed in the report.

The FBI declined to comment on whether it was investigating the report.

A second report, published Tuesday, by Russian outlet RBC details further efforts by the St. Petersburg troll farm’s “American department” to influence opinion in the US, including linking up with activists in order to encourage protests.

The Internet Research Agency is technically a private company, though it’s been linked to the Kremlin and its employees consistently spread pro-Kremlin messages. The Russian government historically maintains a cloak of plausible deniability by outsourcing sensitive operations to private entities. President Vladimir Putin, for instance, referred to “patriotic hackers” when asked about Russian hackers who targeted Democrats in the 2016 election — an operation that major US intelligence agencies agree was ordered by Putin himself.

Warner described the ads and the fake social media accounts as parts of the same influence campaign. “The story in many ways is if the ads are pushing you to a page or to a group, and then you have lots of fake accounts who are then pushing others to try to have that page or that group trend higher, that then attracts a lot of other viewers,” he told BuzzFeed News.

“The ads and the fake accounts work in tandem to generate higher placement,” he said.

Facebook has acknowledged that it’s uncovered evidence that the IRA purchased about $150,000 on political ads targeting Americans. When asked if other affiliates of the Russian government had purchased political ads for the US election, a Facebook spokesperson pointed to an official blog post on the investigation, which admits “It’s possible” others bought ads, and “our internal investigation continues.”

Warner said he believes the St. Petersburg troll farm and others may have had far more influence than social media companies in the US have acknowledged to date. He made a reference to Facebook’s response to meddling in recent elections there to make his point.

“In the French elections, if there were 50,000 accounts that Facebook took down, it just still seems scale-wise [compared to the US], I think there’s more to do,” he said. Facebook has acknowledged taking down 470 accounts and pages it said were linked to the troll farm.

The four-story building in St. Petersburg believed to house the Internet Research AgencyDmitry Lovetsky/AP

A notorious Russian internet “troll factory” spent about $2.3 million during the 2016 election cycle to meddle in US politics, paying the salaries of 90 “US desk” employees who helped wage disinformation campaigns via social media that reached millions of Americans. The operation also contacted US activists directly and offered them thousands of dollars to organize protests on divisive issues, including race relations.

These revelations and many more came out in an investigation published on Tuesday by the Russian newspaper RBC about the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a tech firm based in St. Petersburg, Russia, that has developed a specialty in spreading pro-Kremlin messages in the West.

The IRA has been written about before by a number of news outlets, and by RBC itself. But this latest piece from RBC—a respected business newspaper in Russia known for angering the Kremlin with its reporting on Putin’s associates—is the first to home in on the IRA’s operations during the 2016 US election.

RBC’s investigation reveals an unprecedented level of detail about the money and staffing that went into IRA’s US-influence operation. Here are some of the key data points:

By the middle of 2015, as the US election was ramping up, the IRA’s staffing had increased to between 800 and 900 people. The organization had also shored up its arsenal of media tools to include “videos, infographics, memes, reporting, news, analytical materials,” and more.

In spring 2015, a number of IRA staffers held an experiment to see if they could successfully organize a live event in the US from behind their computer screens in St. Petersburg. They did this by targeting New Yorkers on Facebook and attempting to lure them to a specific event where they would receive a free hot dog. There were no actual hot dogs, but enough people showed up at the specified location to make the agency deem the experiment a success. “From this day, almost a year and a half before the election of the US President,” writes RBC, “the ‘trolls’ began full-fledged work in American society.”

Within the next year, the staff of the IRA’s “American Department” grew threefold, increasing to between 80 and 90 people—about one-tenth of the entire agency.

Three former employees of the IRA told RBC that the head of the American Department is a 27-year-old Azerbaijani man named Dzeihun Aslan, a point also corroborated by an internal Telegram chat obtained by RBC. (Aslan denied any such involvement in conversation with RBC.)

By RBC’s calculations, the American Department spent about $1 million annually on salaries. The lowest-level employees were paid about 55,000 rubles ($960) per month, but also received bonuses based on “the reactions of participants in communities” they were targeting.

RBC identified 118 Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts linked to the IRA’s meddling in US politics.

In September 2016, at the height of the US election season, the American Department posted more than 1,000 pieces of content per week, reaching between 20 and 30 million people that month.

A source close to the leaders of the IRA told RBC that most of the agency’s American content had less to do with supporting a specific candidate than with promoting volatile social issues that happened to dovetail with Trump’s rhetoric. “There was no directive to ‘support Trump,’” one source told RBC. “Direct connections were drawn between societal problems and the actions of the ruling party at that time [the Democrats]. Hillary [Clinton] is the party’s representative, which means she’s also to blame.”

RBC analyzed hundreds of IRA posts and found that Clinton was mentioned in the posts much more often than Trump.

The total budget for promoting political ads to American audiences came to about $5,000 a month, or about $120,000 from June 2015 to May 2017. About half of that was spent on content aimed at sowing racial divisions.

The IRA spent about $80,000 to support 100 US activists who organized 40 different protests across the United States.

Italy, of course, is not alone in trying to find a way to grapple with the global proliferation of propaganda that has sown public confusion and undermined the credibility of powerful institutions.

Pope Francis recently announced that he would dedicate his 2018 World Communications Day address to the topic of fake news, and the United States Congress is investigating how Russian agents manipulated Facebook and Twitter to spread false stories and stoke conspiracy theories to sway the 2016 presidential election.

But ahead of crucial Italian elections early next year, the country has become an especially fertile ground for digital deceit. Frustrated by economic woes, upset by a migrant crisis and fed a steady diet of partisan media, many Italians subscribe to all kinds of conspiracy theories. It is what they call dietrologia, the belief that there is also always something dietro, or behind, the surface.

The Italian passion for seeing intrigue — whether or not it exists — around every corner runs deep, said Alessandro Campi, a professor of political science at Perugia University. “All of this is part of the Italian cultural heritage,” he said.

A history of scheming Borgia cardinals, waves of foreign domination, papal crackdowns and corrupt governments had imbued Italians with an abiding distrust in authority, Mr. Campi said.

In recent years, this background has helped erode the standing of traditional political parties while being expertly exploited by political upstarts, insurgents and outsiders, none more so than the surging Five Star Movement and its founder, Beppe Grillo.

“It’s not only a tactic,” Mr. Campi said of the movement, which has succeeded in attracting votes from the left and the right with an ideologically ambiguous form of populism. “It’s their political worldview.”

Nicola Biondo, a former chief of communications for the Five Star Movement, said that for the party, spreading conspiracies was akin to a policy.

“They use the term Great Powers, never specifying who those powers are,” said Mr. Biondo, who has recently written a book, “Supernova: How Five Star Was Killed,” with another party defector. “It is a mantra.”

Ms. Boldrini, sponsor of the new student curriculum, asserts that the web cannot be forfeited to the fringes, and that the government must teach the next generation of Italian voters how to defend themselves against falsehoods and conspiracy theories designed to play on their fears.

She said she had included Google and Facebook in the project in an acknowledgment that virtual space is where many young Italians live.

Nevertheless, she expressed skepticism in particular about Facebook’s commitment to reining in fake news and hate speech, and recognized the possibility that the Italian school project provided the embattled giant with a much-needed public relations boon.

Facebook was quick to applaud the program. Laura Bononcini, chief of public policy for Facebook in Italy, Greece and Malta, said on Tuesday that “the program is part of an international effort. Education and media literacy are a crucial part of our effort to curb the spread of false news, and collaboration with schools is pivotal.”

Ms. Boldrini also noted that Facebook was contributing by promoting the initiative through targeted ads to high-school-age users, and she said she hoped that the program, which aimed to show students how their “likes” were monetized and politicized, could become a “pilot program” for Facebook throughout Europe.

But some of the Italian course load seems unrealistic. While some tips are useful, such as keeping an eye out for parody URLs, students are also called upon to reach out to experts to verify news stories, essentially asking the students to re-report articles.

The program seeks to deputize students as fake-news hunters, showing them how to create their own blogs or social accounts to expose false stories and “showing how you uncovered it.”

In Italy, that gives them a lot of ground to cover.

For months here, conspiracy theorists who reject scientific consensus have connected vaccinations to medical conditions including autism in children, often blaming pharmaceutical companies as a dark force behind the medical practice. It was an issue that struck a nerve in Italy and played right into the wheelhouse of the Five Star Movement’s distrust of expertise and authority.

In May, amid a measles outbreak, Italy strengthened its vaccination requirements for school-age children, prompting so-called No-Vax activists to protest outside the Italian Parliament for the right to choose.

The vaccination opponents were especially strong in the Five Star Movement, whose leader, Mr. Grillo, once attacked vaccines as a scam by pharmaceutical companies with the intention of “weakening children’s immune systems.”

His wildly popular blog has alleged that some vaccines “can kill,” and websites, such as La Fucina, run by another party leader, Davide Casaleggio, have published anti-vaccine reports.

“It’s what the pharmaceutical companies do, and it’s questionable,” said Paola Barile, 65, as she stood with a Five Star Movement flag wrapped around her shoulders at a protest last week in front of Parliament. “The spell has been broken for us also on vaccines.”

At the same rally, Five Star activists screamed “shame” and railed against the political parties, right and left, for joining forces to draft a new electoral law they considered (maybe correctly this time) designed to keep the movement out of power.

But the Five Star Movement is not the only political force to have profited from fake news, and students are not the only ones who can be deceived by it.

Last weekend, Gian Marco Centinaio, a senator from the Northern League, a right-leaning party, acknowledged that he had put on Facebook a post, subsequently shared 18,000 times, of a picture of a man identified as Ms. Boldrini’s brother, and complained how the news programs “don’t cover” the man’s no-show job that paid 47,000 euros, or more than $55,000, a month. The man in the image was not her brother and none of the allegations were true.

Mr. Centinaio called the post a joke and said, “People should be less credulous.”

A healthy dose of skepticism is exactly what the new Italian program hopes students will adopt.

“If people are prepared, educated on digital,” Ms. Boldrini said, “maybe they don’t fall for it.”

In Italian Schools, Reading, Writing and Recognizing Fake NewsNew York Times
Fake news drips drops of poison into our daily web diet and we end up infected without even realizing it, said Laura Boldrini, the president of the Italian lower house of Parliament, who has spearheaded the project with the Italian Ministry of …

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei responds to US president decertifying nuclear deal saying Tehran will not violate agreement first

Irans supreme leader has said his country will not take heed of rants and whoppers of a foul-throated US president, in a speech that also made clear that Tehran will not be the first to violate the nuclear deal.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in his first reaction since Donald Trump decertified the Iran deal, said on Wednesday that we will not tear up the nuclear deal so long as the other side has not torn it up, but if they do, we will cut it in pieces.

US president Donald Trump is facing legal challenges to his “extreme vetting” order, which freezes immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries and temporarily bans refugees. Elsewhere, a lesser publicised but highly significant drama is taking place. And it could undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency.

In December, the Russian security service arrested four senior cybersecurity experts as a result of an investigation into the hacking of US Democratic Party emails. The arrests could see further evidence revealed that explains how that hacking helped Trump to win the presidency. It could also provide Russian President Vladimir Putin with another ‘blackmail’ lever to use against Trump.

Meanwhile, a former KGB chief has been found dead under mysterious circumstances.

The arrests

The four men arrested are no lightweights. They include [Russian] Sergei Mikhailov, the most senior cybersecurity officer in Russia’s Federal Security Bureau (FSB, formerly KGB). Mikhailov is accused of treason – specifically, of taking bribes from an unspecified foreign organisation, so as to share data on Russian hacking.

Accusations

According to The Moscow Times, a report in Novaya Gazeta claims Mikhailov implicated Vladimir Fomenko and his server rental company King Servers. In September 2016, ThreatConnect (a US cyber investigations agency) accused King Servers of involvement in the hacking of the Arizona and Illinois voting systems. And according to The New York Times, Fomenko claims he was unaware that this had happened until ThreatConnect released its findings.

Stoyanov was in charge of investigating the alleged hacking for Kaspersky Labs. He has been charged with treason. There is speculation that he passed on details of the hacking to US intelligence agents investigating alleged Russian interference in the US elections. But according to Forbes, Stoyanov’s arrest is in connection with the bribery allegations levelled against Mikhailov.

Teddy bears picnicking or hacking?

ThreatConnect has accused the FSB of being the base for hacking group ‘Cozy Bear’. The GRU (Russia’s equivalent of the America’s National Security Agency (NSA)) is accused of being the base for hackers at ‘Fancy Bear‘ (aka APT 28, Strontium, and the Sofacy Group). German intelligence has agreed [German pdf] with ThreatConnect’s assessments.

Unanswered questions

On 16 January, The Canary published an article about the so-called dossier on Trump, authored by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. After summarising the history of that dossier, I concluded:

If Steele’s allegations are genuine, he should come in from the cold, face off his critics, and provide back-up evidence. If only 10% of his claims are shown to be true, there would be grounds for Trump’s impeachment.

To date, that has not happened.

The arrests of cybersecurity specialists in Russia could be interpreted as an attempt by the Kremlin to prevent further information about the alleged hacking being released. Information that could damage Putin’s relationship with Trump. And possibly damage even further the legitimacy of the US elections – and Trump’s victory.

Mysterious death

Meanwhile, linked to the Steele dossier case is the unexplained death [Russian] of a former KGB chief. Oleg Erovinkin was found dead in his Lexus on Boxing Day 2016. That was only days before the Steele dossier was made public.

According to one Kremlin watcher, after leaving the FSB, Erovinkin was appointed deputy to Igor Sechin of state-owned oil giant Rosneft. In his dossier, Christopher Steele referred to Sechin and an alleged meeting with Trump’s foreign affairs adviser, Carter Page.

Steele also added:

“A source close to Rosneft President, Putin close associate and US-sanctioned Igor Sechin, confided details of a recent secret meeting between him and visiting Foreign Affairs Adviser to Donald TRUMP, Carter Page.”

This story is still evolving and may well take centre stage again. We will be following the situation closely as it develops.